Namamugi Incident

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The Namamugi incident happened on 14 September 1862 in Japan's Bakumatsu period. A British merchant, Charles Lennox Richardson, was killed by the armed followers of Shimazu Hisamitsu, the regent of the Satsuma Domain, on a road at Namamugi near Kawasaki.

Richardson and three other British travelers were heading from Yokohama to Kawasaki Daishi temple. They had been warned not to use the Tokaido road that day because a lord’s procession would pass. Richardson, leading the group, rode into the middle of Shimazu’s procession and refused to dismount despite repeated gestures. He was slashed and then fatally wounded by the Satsuma guards. Two of his companions, Woodthorpe Charles Clark and William Marshall, were severely wounded; Marshall’s sister-in-law, Margaret Watson Borradaile, was not harmed. Richardson died after receiving many wounds.

The killing sparked a big dispute. Westerners argued that Richardson’s death was illegal because foreigners in Japan had extraterritorial rights. Japanese officials and samurai argued that the incident was justified under kiri-sute gomen, a samurai right to strike someone perceived as disrespectful. The incident caused a political crisis in Japan and frightened the foreign community in Yokohama.

The British demanded reparations and the perpetrators’ arrest and trial. By mid-1863 the Shogunate had paid £100,000 in compensation, but the Satsuma Domain refused to apologize. In August 1863, a Royal Navy squadron entered Kagoshima to extract the demands by force. The British bombarded Kagoshima after fighting with Satsuma batteries. The raid lasted two days, with casualties on both sides: five Satsuma soldiers killed and eleven British sailors killed, including the captain of the flagship HMS Euryalus. The bombardment destroyed about 500 houses in Kagoshima and sank three Satsuma steamships.

The affair caused a major political stir in Britain and Japan. The Satsuma admired the Royal Navy’s power and began seeking a trading relationship with Britain. In the end, the Satsuma paid £25,000 to the Bakufu as part of a later negotiation, but they never repaid it in full because the Tokugawa Shogunate would soon fall in the Meiji Restoration. The incident is known in Japan as the Anglo-Satsuma War.